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The impact of trauma, the nature of memory, the proper role of the analyst, these issues are as old as psychoanalysis and at its heart. Over the last ten years, a furore has blown up over memories of abuse reported or reconstructed in psychotherapy, and assumed to have been previously repressed. The controversy began and has remained centred in the United States, but has also rumbled loudly elsewhere, with lobby groups being established by the parents of adults claiming early sexual abuse (several thousand in the US, perhaps 350 in the UK: Weiskrantz, 1997). These groups also included academic psychologists who were deeply alarmed by the reported practices of ‘recovered memory therapists’, and by claims that flew in the face of research evidence on the workings of memory systems and the impact of trauma. The debate revisits Freud's dilemma over the seduction hypothesis, but instead of remaining a question of mainly theoretical and professional importance, it has become embroiled in a contemporary climate favouring grievance, exposure and law suits.
Psychoanalysis and related therapies have been passionately accused on both sides of the recovered memories debate. On one side, which sees all or most recovered memori